Elle – April 2001

Last Update:

Stealing Beauty

By Anne Slowey

Uma Thurman considers Hollywood’s idea of physical beauty and is not impressed. Here she delivers her own wholly original vision of movie stardom, motherhood and modelling.

Uma Thurman walks into the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel holding a big pink-and-green-striped bag from the hotel gift shop and an unopened pack of Marlboro Lights. She pulls our a green teddy bear for her nearly three- year-old daughter, Maya Ray, and a pink terry-cloth bathrobe for the babysitter The faint remnants of a tan blush her forehead and cheeks. She and Maya have just returned from vacationing with her parents in Barbados and have come to Los Angeles to join her husband and Maya’s father, actor Ethan Hawke. Hawke, thirty, has been here since early January shooting Training Day, a detective film in which he stars with Denzel Washington. “Gifts. I feel guilty every time I leave the house, so I always bring back presents,” Thurman says, nestling into the corner of a booth, her long, tapered fingers lighting a cigarette one minute and fixing her bangs into a tiny child’s barrette the next. ‘And these,” she adds, nodding to the freshly opened pack on the table with a look of bemused helplessness. “Ethan started smoking again, so now I’m struggling with this again. It’s tone.

Thurman seems to thrive on contradiction. Even with the way she’s dressed-grey chinos and a baby- size sweater over a skimpy tank top-she appears in flux, somewhere between womanhood and girlish- ness, as if some of her daughter’s clothes got lost in her closet and she put them on thinking they were hers, after all. With her straight blond locks, doleful blue eyes, endlessly high forehead, and placid expression, it’s not hard to see why she’s become the thinking man’s sex symbol. Of course, her six-foot frame doesn’t hurt, either. Yet there’s a penetrating sharpness in her gaze that suggests she’s well aware that being beautiful is a loaded proposition. One sideways glance from Thurman is a metaphorical wink that lets you in on the secret; in her case, her looks are the perfect cover for someone with a weak- ness for breaking rules.

This month, Thurman stars in what she describes as one of the biggest and most challenging roles of her career, that of Charlotte Stant in the Merchant Ivory production of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl In the film, her character’s aristocratic poise, intelligence, and sensual appeal-qualities natural to Thurman on-screen and off-place her at the pinnacle of Belle �poque society a class with values that lend themselves more toward appearances than realities. Ultimately, her character’s charms bring about her undoing. After using her beauty to get every- thing she wants, she ends up wealthy, but emotionally abandoned. At the movie’s end, we see Thurman as Charlotte, tormented by her self-made prison, her face twisted in grief The vision is a far cry from the other images we will be seeing of the actress on bill- boards, television, and in magazines around the world in the coming months.

Having recently signed a multimillion-dollar con- tract to become the new “face’ of Lanc6me, Thur- man is also the cosmetics giant’s latest spokesperson, replacing actress Isabella Rossellini, who was let out of her contract after fourteen years in 1995 at the age of forty-three. Thurman’s first campaign for Lancome was Miracle, its newest fragrance, which debuted this past February. In the ads, her face floats beatifically in an otherworldly atmosphere of pink clouds, not unlike a scene out of Contact.

“There’s really just a limit to what can be said about this,” Thurman explains, trying to put an end to the questions she has been asked about her decision to model at this point in her career “It’s really about freedom. Having the freedom to choose the films I want to do more selectively and having the security to stay home with my daughter now, while she’s young.” Over the next two years, she will launch several more products, none of which will be “anti-aging,” as her publicist says jokingly. And though her motives are clear and conscionable, landing a cosmetics contract seems more the line of supermodels than superstars.

Going against the grain, even if that means going commercial, is deeply embedded in Thurman’s> psyche. You could say it’s in her blood. Her father, a professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University is a Buddhist monk and good friend of the Dalai Lama, and her mother, once married to psychedelics guru Timothy Leary is a former model-turned-psychotherapist. Raised in the Buddhist tradition, Thurman, who grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, spent many of her childhood years with her family on pilgrimages of one sort or another in India. She left high school at fifteen to pursue modelling and acting. At nineteen she landed in London, where she filmed Dangerous Liaisons and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. “I grew up in a very mentally challenging environment,” Thurman says of her parents and three brothers. “There was little you could do or say and not be called to task for it. You had to be ready to back up anything that came out of your mouth. I think that’s a discipline that has kept me focused on what’s real and important.”

At thirty-one, Thur- man has played more than twenty roles, ranging from the psychologically complex characters in Henry & June and Mad Dog and Glory to the more naive objects of desire in Beautiful Girls and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Her portray- al of femme-fatales in the film noir-ish comedy Pulp Fiction and the sci-fi thriller Gattaca, where she met Hawke, however, were what catapulted her into the realm of Hollywood’s box- office elite. Of all the A-list actresses her age, she has most easily moved from the indie screen to the mainstream without forfeiting her arty appeal.

In typical Thurman fashion, just as she was standing on the precipice of megastardom, she got pregnant, got married, and dropped out of sight for three years. “I’ve been lost and found a thousand times,” she says of the personal fulfilment of motherhood. “Before I was with Ethan and had a family, I had so much time on my own that it drove me crazy It had a negative effect. .. . I just couldn’t live for me anymore. I felt like, please, let’s change this life. Let’s do something here.”

Psychologists say that babies have a preference for staring at beautiful people. Thurman’s face has the same narcotic effect on most two-legged creatures; there is an odd allure to her looks that holds one in a Zen-like trance. For men she is a sublime vision befitting her namesake, a Hindu goddess. On the flip side, she’s the smart woman’s icon of beauty- possibly because she doesn’t have a perfect little turned-up nose (an insult to any feminist aesthetic), but most likely be- cause one of the emotions her looks don’t inspire is envy She doesn’t throw her hair around. She’s not in any way gratuitously silly, despite her sort of giddy dumb-girl laugh.

On close inspection, you notice Thurman’s face isn’t exactly symmetrical. Her eyes are different sizes, her features are all a little large, and her mouth is slightly off-kilter, a bit funny She even has a big nose. In fact, her face looks almost alien somehow, as if it’s a computer-generated composite of averages. Unlike perfectly sculpt- ed faces, whose familiarity eventually renders them dull, Thurman’s is imperfect, and therefore infinitely compelling. The more you discover her irregularities, the more interesting, ergo the more attractive, she becomes. Slowly, it be- gins to dawn on you that Thurman’s imperfections are what make her seem so modern, which is precisely the reason why Lanc6me would be so interested in hiring her, of course. “Her beauty is a bit off,” says The Golden Bowl director James Ivory “That’s why she’s so fascinating. She changes all the time. She has this extraordinary glamour, and then she can be this incredibly healthy, sensual girl in the next breath. But she’s also very sophisticated, a natural aristocrat.”

Now that Thurman’s marketing her face as a product, she’s bound to be subject to more rigid, albeit superficial, standards. When a performer no longer has the medium of acting to camouflage her flaws and opts to exploit her looks through advertising, all bets are off But nitpicking over genetics is beside the point when compared to what could be perceived as the double-edged sword of selling out on the one hand, and the even greater Hollywood offence of undermining one’s box-office draw on the other.

Using celebrity to endorse a brand can be a difficult line to cross. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Rossellini inked her Lanc6me deal (interestingly enough, it was when she had her first child) before she starred acting. Though being a spokes model didn’t really stand in the way of her career, she never became a box-office sensation, despite her pedigree and popularity in Blue Velvet. Liz Taylor’s reputation has survived peddling fragrances for the last ten years (she’s a legend, after all), but she chose to profit through trade only after her movie career was long in the can. Megastars Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Brad Pitt lend their faces to ads in Italy, but they don’t dare test the waters here.

Thurman doesn’t hesitate to dismiss concerns about her venture. ‘Appearances are very powerful,” she concedes. “But as an actress, your physicality becomes an instrument. I am constantly using myself in a physical way-what my smile is like, how much energy I radiate, my voice, my body, whether I’m planning to do something unusual with it or more mainstream . . . . I just don’t want to create images that make it more difficult for people to be happy”

Cultural and sexual standards are a big issue now that Thurman’s main passion in life is her daughter, and if challenged, she has plenty of opinions on the subject. “The idea of seeing my child abuse herself by buying into a lot of the negative perceptions of our culture, of seeing her limited or derailed from her full development, is terrifying to me, Thurman says, lighting another cigarette.

“Our advertising is so crudely geared in one direction, but I think the media underestimates American men. The idea that a man needs certain conditions to be attracted to some- body, to me makes him very unattractive. Their own sense of sexuality is very limited.”

When Thurman talks about Hawke, with whom she lives in downtown Manhattan, her home for the last ten years, her face takes on a cautious expression, as if she’s afraid her words might be used against him. Her reluctance gives the impression that she’s not carried away by a great sweeping passion, something one would expect given Hawke’s credentials as a Hollywood heartthrob, but a softness in her voice suggests more that she’s protecting him. “He’s good, you know? He’s a really good guy” she says, letting a fine trace of her composure fall away “I feel really grateful to be with someone so nice.” Not a genius, not a great artist, lover, friend-just nice. It’s a compliment so intentionally vague and impersonal, it hurts. You want her to tell you that Hawke’s her prize-they seem so perfectly suited for each other-but her strictly-business demeanour lets you know that Thurman’s not about to expose anyone she’s intimate with to the intrusive glare of the media.

“We have different things we need to do,” she adds. “He’s obsessive about needing to do a lot. I mean, we’re different like that. He’s constantly pawing the ground. He needs six projects ahead of him to fed calm.” One of those projects, Last Word on Paradise, features Thurman in her husband’s feature-directing debut, due out later this year. The film is based on the Nicole Burdette play Chelsea Walk, and tells five stories set in a single day at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City.

Thurman’s other upcoming movies include Richard Linklater’s Tape, a pointed drama about the boundaries of sex and rape in which she co stars with Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard, and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, about a prostitute who seeks revenge on her pimp, that begins shooting this fall. “My work has taken a beating [since having Maya],” Thurman says, as if five films in three years (counting the re- cent Vatel) isn’t enough. “But, you know, it’s not possible to do everything. You have to prioritize, and once you have a child, it’s not that difficult. It’s such a secret emotional world. Basically for the first two years, you are your child’s universe.”

She’s also developing her own project, a play set in the ’8Os that she’s reluctant to talk about but is preparing to turn into a film for HBO. “From now on, I’m keeping one foot in my work,” Thurman says. “I don’t want to be one of those women who puts everything into their kids, and then the poor kids have to carry the weight of their mother’s frustration. But I still want to be as affectionate as possible. I think that if a child can feel totally loved to the point that they’re pushing you away then they have more than they need.”

Ironically, by enabling Thurman to chart her own course, the Lanc6me contract may allow her the flexibility to keep her image-and her life-precisely as she wants it. But she denies having a grand plan. “It’s important to realize that you are always a work in progress,” she muses. “Besides, ifs never lucky to make plans, right? They always get derailed.” Somehow, it seems certain that Thurman’s will stay right on track.